New cheese festival set for this fall
Wisconsin has no shortage of ways to celebrate cheese.
The state hosts contests at the world, U.S. and state level, there’s a grilled cheese championship in Dodgeville, and Cheese Days is held every other year in Monroe.
There’s the Dairy State Cheese & Beer Festival on April 15 in Kenosha, another in June that celebrates cheese, beer and bacon in New Glarus, and the Bluffs, Beer and Cheese Fest on April 22 in La Crosse.
But a new event scheduled for this fall in Madison is expected to draw foodies from around the country and include tours of cheese plants, a cheese ball and a cheese marketplace on East Washington Avenue just off Capitol Square in conjunction with the Dane County Farmers’ Market.
The Art of Cheese Festival, Sept. 29 to Oct. 1, is a production from the Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, a marketing organization founded in 1983 as the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, a promotional and marketing group for dairy farmers. The organization receives 10 cents for every 100 pounds of milk produced in the state, 90% of which is used to make cheese.
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So a cheese festival was a natural fit for a group that helped foster the state’s boom in artisan cheese production and is trying to grow demand nationally and internationally.
“Our mission is to drive demand for Wisconsin milk,” said Suzanne Fanning, chief marketing officer for the state’s $44 billion dairy industry. “We’re really trying to promote cheese outside of the state of Wisconsin. We’ve been doing a lot of research on our core target, which is what we have called the food fanatic, and we found that they really love to travel for food experiences. And so we really want to set ourselves up in…
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